Do you have metals in your tap water? Have you ever filled a pool and had the water get discolored when you added chlorine for the first time? If so, do you know why that happened? And more importantly, do you know how it can be prevented?

Dissolved metals are commonly found in tap water

Source water is different everywhere you go, which is why we insist on testing tap water before filling a pool, or even servicing the pool. If you don’t know what is coming out of the tap, you will be at a severe disadvantage when it comes to managing pool chemistry. Since most pool operators test only a few factors–pH, total alkalinity, chlorine, and sometimes calcium hardness–otherwise predictable problems occur. To really grasp what will happen to the pool, one must know what is coming out of the tap.

If you have ever seen discolored water, or pools with metal stains, that’s an obvious sign of metal content in your water. Iron, when oxidized, turns brownish or orange in color. Stains will be ugly and visible to anyone looking. Copper has more of a light green, or even turquoise look to it when it gets oxidized. Manganese has a dark color, between black and purple, depending on the severity. It is also not uncommon to see a blend of multiple metals for unique colors and stains.

What causes metal stains and discoloration?

Metals are usually the first contaminants in water that chlorine oxidizes. This has to do with chemistry and the ease of oxidation. Here is a chart that shows the breakpoint chlorination curve, and it starts with the first thing chlorine attacks: metals.

Metals like iron, manganese and copper are often the first things oxidized by chlorine.

The chart says in the first section “Destruction of chlorine residual by reducing compounds.” In this case, metals are the reducing compounds, because they get oxidized. Being oxidized means metals lose an electron and take on an oxygen from the oxidizer (chlorine, either HOCl or OCl-). After metals have been oxidized, at the expense of some of the free available chlorine, chlorine then begins to oxidize non-living organics and nitrogen compounds that form combined chlorine.

But let’s get back to metals. When metals are oxidized, they become a new substance altogether. It is usually with oxidation that metals become visible because of their color. Purely dissolved metals that have not been oxidized are normally invisible in water. In other words, oxidation of metals brings out their color in water.

Can metal stains be prevented?

Metal stains in pools can be prevented. The way to prevent metal stains is to control metals. There are a few ways to control metals, but for the purposes of this article, let’s stay with what is practical in the pool business: removal, sequestration, and chelation.

How to remove metals from water

With certain types of filter media, metals can actually be filtered out. Such products do exist, but they can be costly. One such example is reverse osmosis, which takes just about everything out of the water…metals included. There are specific metal trapping filters that can be attached to hoses and plumbing that target heavy metals specifically as well. Some pool filters can also trap metals if they have a small enough filter media. Even so, with the help of certain sequestering agents, filters can capture metals to be backwashed or removed from the water.

If your metals are very high, removing them is a good idea. The less heavy metals you have in your water, the easier to manage.

Metal sequestration

Sequestering agents are common in the pool industry. Sequestering agents work kind of like a ‘metal magnet’, which attract metal ions into a cluster. When the electrons bind to the sequestering agent, oxidation of those metals can no longer occur, which is great! Sequestering prevents metal stains and discoloration of water. That being said, the metals are in suspension, and still in the water. The good news is, sequestered metals can more easily be caught by a filter and removed.

The challenge with sequestering metals is that most of the sequestering products are some kind of phosphate-based acid. Phosphonic acid is the most common type, and it is used even in municipal water treatment systems. Sequestering metals protects infrastructure and can also prevent scale in water treatment pipes. Normally this would be no big deal, except that phosphonic acid is basically liquid phosphates, and food for microorganisms like algae. So pool operators now have elevated phosphate levels to deal with.

What do you think happens when the pool operator uses a phosphate remover? The sequestering agent is wiped out, and the metals it was holding are now released back in the water, and available to be oxidized once again. The use of phosphate-based sequestering agents, therefore, should be used either temporarily for metal removal, or at least with the knowledge of their impact on phosphate levels.

Metal chelation

Chelation is similar to sequestration, in that it binds with metals and prevents oxidation (and metal stains). Unlike a sequest, which binds many metal ions together into a cluster of sorts, a chelant grabs individual metal ions. No clustering, just individual metal ions that have been chelated separately.

In our far-from-scientific lingo, we think of it like this: sequestering agents cluster metals and hold them in suspension; chelating agents grab individual metal ions separately and hold them in solution.

Our Metal and Scale Inhibitor (MSI) is an NSF-50 Certified chelating agent. It is not phosphate-based, and therefore compatible with phosphate removers. MSI is great at preventing stains and discoloration because it holds metals in solution and protects them from oxidation. That being said, MSI is not meant to be used to remove metals. When you hold metals in solution, they may pass through filters, unlike clustered metals bound to a sequestering agent.

Prevention is easier than Correction

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” – Benjamin Franklin

You can remove, sequester or chelate metals before they are oxidized. If you do, metal stains should not occur. Be sure to test tap water to know the metal content, so you know how much is being introduced on a weekly basis when the pool is replenished with water. Once stains begin to form, it may take citric acid to lift them off the surface, and that process is aggressive on plaster.

We hope this article helps you better understand metals, and gives you hope that yes, you can prevent metal stains and discolorations in your pool. If you have specific questions, contact us or your local NextGeneration Dealer.

Combined chlorine is a concern shared by commercial pool operators worldwide. But what is combined chlorine? How does combined chlorine form? Is combined chlorine the same as chloramines? If not, what’s the difference between combined chlorine and chloramines? The science is advanced, but as usual, we are here to distill the information down and simplify it for you.

What is combined chlorine?

Combined chlorine is chlorine that has combined with nitrogen compounds present in water. Such compounds include monochloramine, dichloramine and trichloramine (which actually off-gasses into the air). At least, the three types of chloramines are what most people are familiar with. Combined chlorine includes a myriad of other disinfection byproducts (DBPs) like chloroform and other trihalomethanes. There are too many to name in this article.

Combined chlorine is easy to measure. Simply measure the Total Available Chlorine (TAC) and subtract Free Available Chlorine (FAC) from it. TAC – FAC = Combined Chlorine (CC). It’s essentially a measurement of chlorine present that is no longer free and available. Once chlorine oxidizes and combines with nitrogen compounds, it is no longer free chlorine. That being said, combined chlorine still has some disinfecting power, albeit far weaker than Hypochlorous Acid (HOCl).

Some health departments have limits to combined chlorine levels. Some states set a maximum level at 0.4 ppm. If your pool exceeds that, the health department can get involved. We also know that most people can smell the “pool smell” of chloramines at any level above 0.2 ppm of combined chlorine.

Here is an example of calculating combined chlorine:

2.5 ppm TAC – 1.7 ppm FAC = 0.8 CC

The nitrogen question: how does it get into pools?

To understand combined chlorine, chloramines and other issues in pools, we need to start with a basic understanding of nitrogen. And how nitrogen gets into a pool. There are basically four (4) ways nitrogen can get in the water.

1. Naturally

Nitrogen gas itself (N2) makes up something like 80% of our breathable air. It’s very prevalent in our environment, but because Nitrogen gas has a triple covalent bond, living things cannot use it in its natural form. And yet, Nitrogen is needed by all living things, plants and animals alike. It is a micronutrient essential to life. So how is it used?

Certain plants (like legumes) and bacteria carry a special enzyme called nitrogenase that can break the triple covalent bond holding Nitrogen gas together. This allows for usable Nitrogen compounds to be formed, such as ammonia (NH3), ammonium (NH4+), nitrite (NO−2) and nitrate (NO−3). These compounds are found in soils throughout nature. Naturally, these forms of nitrogen can find their way into swimming pools, maybe through soil runoff, or dirt on our skin, etc.

2. Source water

Believe it or not, municipal water treatment plants sometimes deliberately add nitrogen compounds to water. They do this to produce chloramines, which have some disinfection power (but not much). The benefit of chloramines vs. chlorine, however, is staying power. Chloramines last a lot longer in the pipes than normal chlorine.

The downside of this is obvious: chloramines are introduced through the source water.

3. Bathers

One of the most common sources of Nitrogen, especially in commercial pools, comes from bathers. And I don’t just mean people, I mean any bathers. This includes ducks and other birds that enjoy your pool, dogs, and other living things. But for now, let’s focus on people.

There is a compound called urea that is found in human sweat and urine. Urea is primarily made up of ammonia (??), which is a nitrogen compound. Urea is the culprit behind campaigns against swimmers peeing in the pool, because urea takes a lot of chlorine to oxidize out of the water.

4. Pool and other cleaning chemicals

Finally, people add chemicals to (and around) their pools. Some chemicals are ammonia-based, such as deck cleaners, common algaecides and disinfection chemicals. We see this all the time. A pool operator has a mystery combined chlorine problem, but a low bather load. Come to find out, they clean their pool deck every night with an ammonia-based cleaner. Or they fight algae with an ammonium sulfate algaecide. Be aware that these products work great in the short term, but leave nitrogen behind, which will become combined chlorine.

The combined chlorine process

In a nutshell, the combined chlorine cycle works something like this: nitrogen compounds in the water are oxidized by chlorine. It takes a lot of hypochlorous acid—the strong, killing form of chlorine—to convert nitrogen to its next form, and the next, and next, and eventually off-gassed out of the water. We say “a lot of hypochlorous acid”, because eventually it takes a 15:1 molar ratio of HOCl to Ammonia to get it out of the water. 5:1 creates monochloramine. 5-10:1 converts monochloramine to dichloramine. And 15:1 creates trichloramine, which eventually off-gasses out of the water (and then becomes a nightmare for air quality).

The nitrogen cycle in a swimming pool gets really complex, with all sorts of chemistry reactions that can occur. What you need to know is chlorine will eventually oxidize nitrogen out, but not easily. Chlorine is a great sanitizer, but comparatively, it’s not so great of an oxidizer. Eventually chlorine will overpower nitrogen and get it out. This is known as reaching breakpoint chlorination.Breakpoint chlorination is when chlorine overcomes nitrogen and organic loading, and begins to build a free chlorine residual.

How to reduce combined chlorine and chloramines

Combined chlorine needs to be destroyed, either through secondary sanitation systems or enough chlorine to complete its oxidation. Chloramines will eventually go airborne as trichloramines, which then become an air problem. We strongly recommend both a proactive and reactive approach to addressing combined chlorine.

Proactive methods to reduce combined chlorine

Minimize chlorine’s burden on things like non-living organic bather waste so it can focus on germs and oxidizing nitrogen. Such an approach can be accomplished by use of NSF-Certified enzymes, like AAD. AAD (Amino Acid Digester) breaks down carbon-based organic waste in the water, which chlorine would otherwise have to oxidize. With AAD, chlorine has much less carbon waste to fight, and therefore it is freed up to go after nitrogen. AAD is highly effective at optimizing chlorine efficiency.

Another proactive approach is to manage water with a slightly lower pH, like 7.2 to 7.4. Why a lower pH? Because the lower the pH, the higher percentage % of HOCl your chlorine will be. This means your chlorine will be stronger.

To manage a pool with lower pH, however, pool operators must maintain water balance according to the LSI and/or Ryznar index. If you use our LSI Calculator App, you will see that a lower pH creates more aggressive water. To compensate for a lower pH, you will need to have an above-average level of calcium hardness or carbonate alkalinity. Calcium Hypochlorite chlorine is a great choice for pools looking to optimize chlorine efficiency with a lower pH.

Another proactive approach is to make sure cleaning agents used in and around the pool are free of ammonia and other nitrogen products. You might be surprised! A lot of pool deck cleaners are basically pure ammonia.

Reactive methods to reduce combined chlorine

Once chlorine has combined with nitrogen compounds, short of shocking the pool with a lot more chlorine (hyperchlorination), there are secondary systems that can help. Medium pressure Ultraviolet systems (UV) can be very effective at destroying monochloramine and dichloramine. Ozone is another secondary system which can both sanitize and oxidize. Both of these systems are proven to help.

Another technology, relatively recent to aquatics, can also help in a major way. It’s called hyper-dissolved oxygen (HDO). Without making sanitation claims, the principle of HDO is simply to dissolve a lot of oxygen into the water, which can accelerate oxidation throughout the body of water. Unlike Ozone or UV, which are contained to the pump room—and therefore point-of-contact systems—HDO sends oxygen out into the pool, where it works alongside chlorine. Just like AAD enzymes, HDO can be out in the field where the people are, working to help chlorine get the job done.

Conclusion

To keep control over combined chlorine, do your best to minimize nitrogen introduction. Check chemicals for anything like “ammonium” in the label…and avoid using them. Optimize chlorine efficiency, either by lowering pH or using AAD enzymes (or both). Use a secondary system like UV, Ozone or Hyper-dissolved oxygen. These strategies can make a huge difference.

Scum lines are very common in pools

In our business (commercial swimming pools), almost every pool has a scum line. Yes, even gutter pools can have them. For the sake of this article, let’s define a scum line as a visible layer of deposits at the water level that adhere to surfaces: walls, ladders, rails, tile lines or gutters.These deposits are not always the same. In fact, we find they are usually a mixture of non-living organics and anything that adheres to them. Because non-living organics in pools are often sticky and/or slimy, any number of suspended contaminants can join in on the scum line party.

We have seen hair, lint, grease, dirt, leaves, and other fun stuff adhered to pool walls at the water level. We have also seen deposits of calcium carbonate scale, calcium phosphate scale, and dried salt. This article will explain how and why scum lines form; and more importantly, how to prevent and remove existing scum lines.

Chlorine vs. Bather Waste

Figure 1. 100 parts-per-million chlorine in a bowl of water, versus a small amount of WD-40. It congealed into a hardened mess. Is chlorine really cut out for oxidizing oils and non-living organics? Surely 100 ppm should be enough to handle a small amount of oil. Right?

Non-living organic waste, or bather waste, comes in many forms. Body oils, sweat, mucous, urine…but also what we put on our bodies: lotions, hair products, sunscreen, etc. All of these contaminants contribute to the oxidant demand that chlorine must overcome to do its primary job: sanitation. Have you ever seen what chlorine does to a high concentration of bather waste? We experimented with 100 ppm chlorine in a bowl of water with a squirt of WD-40 (a type of oil). See the Figure 1.

The reality is this: chlorine is designed to be a sanitizer. It has to overcome the oxidant demand in order to exceed breakpoint chlorination, but chlorine is inefficient at it. Rather than oxidizing the oil out of the water in the bowl, it actually turned into a sort of hard gel. Very odd, indeed.

This gel is very sticky and all types of dirt and debris can attach to it. But why only at the water line?

Non-living organics and oils float

Who remembers the elementary school experiment where you pour vegetable oil into a glass of water? It floats and stratifies, because oil is less dense than water. This same principle applies to non-living organics. They act like greasy oils and float to the surface. This explains why scum lines are never found deep below the surface; they adhere at the water level only. Below is a video to demonstrate more on that.

The same ‘scum’ fouls filters and leads to costly sand changes. That is, of course, unless you chemically refurbish your sand. Nobody denies that scum lines are a nuisance in a public pool. Lifeguards spend countless hours scrubbing them with brushes and tile cleaners, and sometimes have to use pumice stones to remove hardened scum lines. Okay, to be fair, the latter is when you have hardened calcium carbonate scale on the tile line…and we will address that in a moment. The point is, these scum lines never show up three feet underwater, or near the main drain, right?

They always show up at the water line because oils float. So let’s treat the oils accordingly.

Scale and scum lines are different, but can coexist

Salt generators give off heat during electrolysis. They also release a byproduct of sodium hydroxide (caustic lye) which raises the pH and the saturation index of the water. High pH and heat tend to encourage calcium carbonate to fall out of solution and harden.

Because scale is often in the same location as a scum line, the two problems are associated with one another. The truth is, they are completely different problems caused by completely different factors. While scum is at the water line because non-living organics float, scale forms near the water line because of temperature.To be more precise, scale forms when the water is over-saturated with calcium carbonate (according to either the Langelier Saturation Index (LSI) or Ryznar Index). One of the factors in both of those indices is water temperature.

The warmer the water, the higher the LSI or Ryznar, and the more likely it is that calcium carbonate will fall out of solution and harden. That’s what we call scale.

Have you ever noticed that carbonate scale forms first in heat exchangers and/or salt cells? Or how about on your shower head or faucet at home? Hot tubs scale way more often than swimming pools. For visible scale in the swimming pool, calcium will always harden in the warmest areas first. Think of the sunniest, darkest tile that gets the hottest. Or a spillway. You can probably picture it in your head. If not, we have included some photos.

Before and after treating the pool with MSI and balancing the water to LSI standards. The scale was gone in two weeks.

How to prevent and remove scum lines

Prevention

The first thing is to address bather waste with something other than chlorine. We recommend a commercial-grade enzyme like our Amino Acid Digester (AAD). It circulates throughout the entire pool along with chlorine to break down and digest oils and other bather waste. It bubbles off carbon dioxide and effectively removes the oily waste from the water. Following our dosing recommendations for your pool should prevent scum lines from forming.

Removal

Already have existing scum lines? If they are just grease related, using AAD in circulation and raising your water level can help remove them without labor. That said, normally they form at or right above the water line, due to evaporation loss and the wet-dry effect. So you may still need to clean the tiles. No problem, just use a good tile cleaner. If there is carbonate scale, you may want an acid-based tile cleaner for quick removal. Just like AAD, however, MSI can gently remove scale on your water line…but does so gently over time. It also needs to be soaking the scale, so scale above the water line will need manual cleaning.

Thanks for your time, and if you have any questions or need help, contact us.

Meaningful pool care in more ways than one

Think of the most dynamic pool chemical you know of. What does it do? When we think of the word “dynamic”, it suggests multiple uses and a range of positive results. Metal & Scale Inhibitor (MSI), to us, is one very dynamic pool chemical. It serves many functions, including the ability to both prevent and undo common problems in swimming pools and other water treatment systems. Let’s share some of them.

1. Preventative water chemistry

Water chemistry affects everything in a water system. If your water is corrosive, it can cause damage to surfaces and equipment. Conversely, if it is scale-forming, the scale itself can cause damage too; pipes with scale in them can increase water pressure and reduce flow rates.

The most important factor in preventing corrosion and scale is LSI balance. After that, it helps to have a chelant like MSI to hold minerals and metals in solution. Take calcium carbonate scale, for example. If calcium is held in solution by MSI, it takes a much more for scale to form. Think of MSI as allowing more grace to your water chemistry.

It’s not that MSI prevents these problems from happening…it’s that it gives you, as an operator, an advantage in handling minerals and metals.

2. Protecting pool plaster

Pool plaster is most vulnerable while it is curing. Plaster curing can take 30 days more more while the surface hydrates underwater and hardens. Given that calcium chloride is often used as an accelerant in plaster mix, it provides available calcium to water that is probably calcium-deficient. Water will stop at nothing to reach equilibrium. As the universal solvent, water dissolves whatever calcium it can find and bring it into solution for its own benefit; the most readily available source is plaster or tile grout.

But what about vinyl liner pools, or fiberglass? The LSI still applies, but the difference is water has no source of calcium. Therefore, low LSI water corrodes its way through everything trying to find it. The damage can be severe over time. For vinyl liners, this can mean fading, wrinkling or even wearing through the liner itself, allowing water underneath it. It’s no good.

MSI provides more grace to the LSI. In effect, it seems to buffer the LSI acceptable range, making it more difficult to form scale, and more difficult to corrode. Of course, this buffering benefit has its limits. At some point, the LSI can be so far out of range that no amount of MSI can stop the inevitable consequences. Use MSI immediately upon filling (and refilling) a swimming pool. It gives you more time to adjust the chemistry to get in proper LSI range.

3. Dechlorination

With any sequestering agent or chelant, one of two things happens: it gets oxidized by chlorine, or it wipes out chlorine. MSI’s initial “purge” dose wipes out chlorine. In most cases, this is an annoyance; chlorine must be hand-fed for two or three days to catch up, because otherwise the pool is unsafe. Fortunately, the weekly maintenance dose of MSI is small enough that it hardly has any impact on chlorine levels. More importantly, the good news about MSI is it will not be oxidized out of the water by chlorine. That means it stays in the water and works to your benefit over a longer period of time. It’s just the initial concentration of the purge dose of MSI that overpowers chlorine…and when dosed properly and evenly circulated throughout the pool, chlorine levels can maintain just fine.

Dechlorination is sometimes needed, however. For example, if you need to do certain types of maintenance, or bring chlorine levels down from recent hyperchlorination, MSI can help. Rather than using sodium thiosulfate, MSI can accomplish more than just lower chlorine. After all, you get the benefits of this dynamic pool chemical while lowering the chlorine level to where you want it.

Realistically, dechlorination is a rare need for swimming pools…but sometimes it’s urgent. MSI can drop chlorine levels down in just minutes.

4. Chelating Metals, Preventing Stains

Metals are the first things to be oxidized when chlorine is added to water.

Stains come in many different colors, and there are entire businesses devoted to stain removal. We are not one of them…but again, MSI is a dynamic pool chemical. Just like with calcium, MSI gives more grace to the water’s ability to hold metals in solution. With MSI in your water, metals have a far more difficult time coming out of solution and staining, because the metals are chelated.

Chelating metals means MSI isolates each metal ion and binds with them. Binding with metal ions prevents them from being oxidized.

When stains originate from behind the plaster, the stains will continue to occur. MSI cannot prevent these types of stains.

Can MSI remove existing metal stains?

Over time, MSI has shown it can gently dissolve stained metals back into solution and lift them from the pool surface. We told you MSI is a dynamic pool chemical. Unlike acid-based products, however, this process is slow. You may want to combine its efforts with ascorbic acid (vitamin C) to speed up the process. That said, be sure that the stain in question is, in fact, caused by metals in the water. Some stains come from behind the pool surface itself, like rebar being too close to the surface. In those cases, MSI cannot prevent or permanently remove that problem.

5. Scale removal

Yes, just like removing stains, MSI can dissolve calcium back into solution as well. Of course, the long-term solution is LSI balanced water…but even then, hardened scale won’t move easily. MSI is the chemical to soften and remove scale deposits around your pool. It can even remove scale on spillways and water falls, as long as the MSI-treated water has time to affect the scale area. Raise your water level to remove scale on a tile line, for example.

In a matter of weeks, MSI gently removed carbonate scale from this pool’s spillway. In addition, this pool used AAD enzymes. Look at the difference in water clarity!

Automated feed pump technology is simple, yet wonderfully dynamic. We at Next Generation Water Science encourage all of our commercial pool customers to feed their maintenance dose of our AAD Enzymes via an automated feed pump. Yes, you could pour in the weekly maintenance dose every week, but if you have automation, why?

Feed pumps never forget

Consistency is arguably the largest benefit of using automation in your pool system. We are human beings, and it’s not unusual for us to forget something now and again. With an automated feed pump, chemicals like chlorine and acid can be automatically fed into the system based on a signal from a sensor. For example, an ORP sensor knows what the pool’s conductivity is. If the ORP is dropping, the controller recognizes there is an increase in chlorine demand and adjusts the chlorine accordingly.

Operators cannot manually keep up with such real-time water chemistry. It would require constant testing and adjusting.

When it comes to our enzymes–Amino Acid Digester (AAD)–the product is a non-toxic, non-hazardous liquid that can be easily administered via automated feed pump. This allows for daily dosing of enzymes instead of manual pouring. It also gets the measurement exactly right, every time.

BECSys controllers and automated feed pump

BECSys controllers show pool operators great information about their water chemistry.

We love BECSys controllers for a few reasons. First and foremost, they are reliable and easy for operators to use. BECS displays show valuable metrics of pool chemistry to help an aquatics director make informed decisions about how to treat their water. For example, you can know, in real time, the pH, ORP and Temperature of the water.

It also shows you the LSI and Ryzner indexes, Calcium hardness (ppm), alkalinity (ppm), and a time stamp.

The BECSys controller and its subordinate automated feed pumps serve to regulate pool chemistry. It allows for 24/7 chemical balancing of any liquids: chlorine, acid, and yes, AAD Enzymes.

Automated Feed Pump vs. Manual Pouring

In commercial pools, there is no fair comparison between pool automation and manual chemical pouring. Automation removes human error in measuring and dosing frequency. It also reduces the risk of spilling chemicals and reduces operator labor. Furthermore, chemicals are more effective when added frequently at smaller doses versus large doses infrequently. For AAD enzymes, manual pouring is a weekly task. That task could be automated and broken into daily dosing of smaller amounts.

For enzymes, feed pumps need to be calibrated to a very low setting. Unlike chlorine and acid–which can be fed in large increments–enzymes are fed in ounces at a time. Contact your pool service company for help in calibrating the feed pump and chemical controller to pull this off.

Do you have great water quality?

People ask us all the time “why should I treat my pools with enzymes?” To us, that’s not the right question to start with. Let’s start with where your water quality is now, versus where you would like it to be. Nobody has perfect water all the time, because bather loads and circumstances are ever changing. If you have water quality that you are happy with, you may not have a need to do anything different–enzymes included.

That said, if you are an operator always looking for better ways to achieve great results, or even greater results than you currently have, you may want to consider enzyme water treatment.

Not all enzymes are created equal

We work with customers all over the nation, and many of them have tried enzymes before we met them. We hear the same criticisms over and over, but it boils down to this: they were hoping for results that enzymes did not deliver. We get it, and we are not a company that wants to over-promise or under-deliver. Enzymes serve an important purpose in water management, but nothing more than that purpose.

Enzymes break down and digest non-living organics (bather waste). By handling the organic load in the water, it allows for better water clarity, chlorine efficiency, and overall water quality (feel, taste, smell, etc.). Just ask the swimmers who train in water treated with our enzymes.

Enzyme water treatment does the heavy lifting

Before Enzyme Water Treatment

Same pool, 48 hours later

Tired of backwashing all the time? Tired of all that wasted water (and chemicals that treated that wasted water)? How about the gunky filters, scum lines and cloudy pool water? Sick of fighting low ORP and high combined chlorine? Frustrated with your cost of chemicals and maintenance? If you are, consider enzymes…because all of those problems are symptoms of inadequate bather waste management.

Our enzyme water treatment product is called Amino Acid Digester (AAD). It is professional grade, formulated to handle the most extreme swimming pool bather loads. Sounds potent and strong (because it is), yet AAD is also NSF/ANSI Certified to Standards 50 & 60, which means AAD meets the NSF® drinking water safety standard. Powerful, yet drinking water safe.

If you have tried enzymes before, and you weren’t pleased with the results, it could have been for a number of circumstances…strength of product being only one of them. Talk to one of our authorized dealers or contact us directly for more information.